What is a good comeback or argument towards people who say “But I have nothing to hide” when you try to information them that privacy is important?
As a retired psychotherapist I can tell you, that every single person on this planet has something to hide.
Obviously, psychotherapy offers a safe, private and confidential space to speak about those things. Society does not offer this safe space. So Humans hide things.
Sometimes these hidden things are even hidden from the person.
we have all broken our own, and societies, moral codes, the things we do not share with other people.
Our own sexual preferences are the most hidden of all subjects. Even in this so called Enlightened age. Sexuality still reigns supreme as the most hidden of all subjects.
I always say to people spouting the “I have nothing to hide” argument.
If you have nothing to hide!
Why do you continue to wear clothes when you go out.
Clearly it has nothing to do with the fact that: a CCTV camera on the corner of your street, a camera in a passing car, a RING doorbell facing towards the street, school kids filming with their phones, will film you and intrude upon your private life.
It is because you have something to hide.
For instance: Examples of the things that people hide.
As we see this quite regularly with our politicians and those generally in powerful positions:
The Pro family values political evangelists who espouses that homosexuality is a sin, and then gets caught with a male prostitute.
In psychoanalysis this this called “Splitting”. Its where the politician projects all his hidden, unacceptable parts of himself, in this case his homosexual preferences, and projects them onto other people in society. Those bad bad people who are homosexuals.
Or the pro child protection evangelist politician, who gets caught with gigabytes of child abuse images on their laptop. Same thing.
Its the same with the recent rise in the Right Wing anti-everything brigade;
anti-immigrant, who most likely had a foreign girlfriend when they were young, and are now ashamed of it because their mates are anti-immigrant. Group think.
anti-abortion, probably got a girl pregnant, wasnt man enough to support her, and left her no choice to get an abortion. Misogyny
anti-homosexual, probably a repressed homosexual who fantasises about sex with same sex partners. Far too ashamed to come out.
anti-this anti-that; Oh the shame!
This always speaks more about the hidden belief systems that those people carry. It is not about the people onto whom they are trying to project there own personal stuff.
To be human is to have a private life, and to keep it secret.
Saying you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is like not caring about free speech because you have nothing to say.
Has anybody ever really said that “I have nothing to hide” in the wild? I only ever read that in online discussions about how to counter that argument. Proponents of surveillance I met were either “companies need to have all the data, else they don’t survive the harsh competition” when it comes to surveillance capitalism or the say “All the crimes, protect the children” when it comes to state surveillance. They seem to be aware that they lose privacy, but they believe that it is OK for what they get.
Yes, unfortunately. I heard it as an answer, to me trying to move people to Signal…
My spouse didn’t get it until she watched Meredith Whittaker’s SXSW talk. I just wasn’t eloquent enough. She admitted I had made the same points, but not as well. Show people that video. https://www.youtube.com/live/AyH7zoP-JOg
Nothing to hide doesn’t mean everything to share. When it comes to id verification specifically talk about:
- how storing millions of IDs will be a tempting honeypot for hackers, making data breaches much more likely and much more common.
- how these companies will become a digital playground for traffickers searching through leaked IDs, looking for potential trafficking victims.
- how these laws could lead to stalking, harassment, and get people murdered or raped.
- how these laws could escalate political violence in a society already divided and rife with polarization. Having access to someone’s address, searching their address on Google Maps, seeing a political sign in the yard is political violence waiting to happen.
- how these laws could very well lead to someone committing suicide after their ID is leaked and posted, which led to them being stalked or harassed.
When people doubt you or accuse you of paranoia, concern trolling, or fear mongering:
- Remind them about the Tea app incident (in which 13,000 IDs were leaked and posted online) and ask what if Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit is next?
- Tell them: Don’t underestimate hackers and don’t trust these companies to delete your information.
- Tell them: Don’t underestimate what people are actually capable of and the kinds of ideas that go through people’s heads (there are some really bad people and really unhinged people in the world).
- Even accuse your politicians and lawmakers of backing or being behind human trafficking rings if you have to to let them know how serious these risks are.
Also remind them that wanting surveillance to make sure everyone is following the law is bad because not all laws are good! Civil disobedience is a powerful tool against tyranny and we must protect it. I don’t want a society where no one breaks the law.
Nothing to hide
This word ‘hide’ is quite problematic, however, it is a testament to the power of propaganda. Using the word ‘hide’ gives the connotation of doing something nefarious. ‘What are you hiding? It must be bad else you wouldn’t be hiding it.’ Keys and locks prevent unauthorized access, full stop. They do not portend nor foreshadow guilt in any way. If they did, everyone with a key chain in their pocket would go directly to jail.
We generate data everyday in our digital lives. Whom does it belong to? Me!! This is my data. I generated it with my labor. I secure it. I archive it. I mother hen it. I reserve the right to share it or not. My labor may just be in the form of clickety click click, but it’s still my property. As much my property as any worldly possessions I may own. It is certainly not to property of corporate business who are involved with surveillance capitalism. When a corporation’s website checks cookies to see where I’ve been previously, and use that data to bolster the company’s profit margins, without giving me due compensation, that is THEFT. It is as much theft as if I walked into the self same company’s CFO’s office, picked up a paperweight off his desk, and walked out with it. It’s theft. One of the biggest thieves on the planet that readily comes to mind is Google. Ever wonder how Google got it’s fingers into everyone’s pie? They build their multi billion dollar company on the data of it’s users. They stole it.
It also doesn’t belong to the government either. One of the questions I get asked a lot is, ‘Are you hiding from the government’ which I think is hilarious. I send them tax forms every year. Every four years I vote, and in local elections. Long time ago, Social Security used to send me letters telling me how much they weren’t going to give me of my money. What a crock of shit that is. While I am not ‘hiding’ from the government, there is absolute no reason to overshare either.
The same mechanisms that provide security, protection, and privacy in the home, be they locks on the front door, surveillance cams, window blinds, alarm systems, are the same mechanisms that keep your data safe, secure, and private on your network. Just because I have black out curtains on my windows doesn’t mean I am hiding a damn thing. It means I wish to keep whatever it is that I am doing, private. Same with data my data.
Encrypting something does not mean being guilty of hiding something nefarious. It is a key and a lock that prevents unauthorized access.
Sorry for the rant. You make great points. It just makes me cringe when people say ‘hide’. It’s like little fingernails on the chalkboard of my mind.
I simply qoute Edward snowden. “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
That phrase was also propaganda used by the Nazi’s in ww2 aswell as media
You won’t get anywhere if you use the “leave your bathroom door open” or “unlock your phone and give it to me” arguments, because to them that is a different thing and they pretty much know what it means to have privacy on those aspects. What they don’t care about are the things they don’t see (i.e. social media tracking, location data access, etc.) and that’s what they consider nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear.
So the best examples I could think of to counter those arguments are:
- Surveillance pricing
- Abysmal security of home security cameras
If they DO care that prices on the stuff they buy is influenced based on their habits and the data companies collect on them, or if they DO care that anyone can potentially tap into their home cameras to watch even just their outdoor cameras (let alone indoor ones), then they DO care about privacy and just don’t realize it.
I close the door when I poop.
It’s no secret, and I’m not doing anything wrong, but it’s MY business and nobody else’s.
Then why do they have a lock on their phone? Their house? Why do they wear pants? They already won’t give their phone number or email address to anyone who asks. They already practice privacy.
It’s not about having something to hide, it’s about protecting what you share against misuse. Think identity theft.
I may have nothing to hide, but that doesn’t mean I want to share everything with everyone.
There’s some good answers in the other replies, but basically asking them questions like “Why do you have curtains on your windows?” Is generally pretty effective. People just don’t seem to realize that our digital lives are as personal as our physical lives, and just because we’re not breaking a law doesn’t mean we don’t still have a need to hold a private life.
People generally agree that you should have privacy from your neighbors, yes. Not having that would have real consequences for people. Like it could affect what people think of you etc.
But often the discussion is about if the government should be able to snoop on your web traffic or if large corporations should be allowed to gather data about you so they can customize advertising.
It is a logically consistent position to be okay with Google accessing your phone’s data but not wanting your neighbor to have such access. No one is advocating the latter, so I think we need to sharpen our arguments. Otherwise we’re just making a strawman argument.
I both agree and disagree. I agree that people are often unswayed by pro-privacy arguments. I disagree that it is the fault of the arguments themselves. The problem is that people are uneducated regarding the repercussions of abdicating their privacy to a government or corporation. They don’t want their neighbors to be able to see in to their bedroom, but they find no issue with allowing Google (or any data-miner/government) to create complex and nuanced profiles of their habits, tastes and psychological tendencies that is full of identity rich data. It’s tantamount to handing over your fingerprints “because why not.”
Man’s reach has excedded his grasp with technology, and most of us in the general public have no real understanding of how it all works. Perhaps a bit like the north American Natives not understanding the significance of selling their land to european settlers until it was to late.
From an informed perspective, it isn’t logically consistent to be ok with Google having unfettered access to your phone’s data but not so with your neighbor. One is a person, someone you may even have real reason to trust, and the other is a profit driven corporation that has repeatedly shown that it will violate civil rights in their pursuit of dominance in their field. People have lost their ability to value the right to privacy because the corporations have conditioned them to do so. The book 1984 has many good depictions of what it is like to symbolically “live a life with no curtains,” and it’s a hellscape. However I think people are just not informed or educated enough in the significance of privacy to see this clearly in our current setting. That’s not really something we can address in the short span of a conversation. It’s just beginning to dawn on some of my family members after almost a decade of me sharing info with them, and usually it comes after they see some piece of media that dramatizes the invasion of digital privacy on TV. Sad that our world view is so dependant on media like that.
Ask them if they will give you a copy of their taxpayer identification number, medical records, and all their account passwords.
When they inevitably say no, say, well, I thought you had nothing to hide.
More likely than not, though, what’s going to happen is that they are going to be too thick-headed to get it, and there’s nothing you will be able to say to convince them otherwise. And so you just have to cut off contact with that person if they don’t want to respect your privacy.
I have parted ways with old friends and made new friends because my old friends refused to understand my need for privacy and stop trying to send me unencrypted text messages, etc.
Edit: Do not compromise for family members either.
There is no ‘good’ argument to persuade anyone (of anything) the moment they don’t want to change their mind. But, depending who your talking to, asking a question maybe? More often than not the ‘nothing to hide’ is just an excuse to not change their habits (which is their right), exactly like the ‘I don’t have time to read books’ so, so many people use today to explain why they never read.
What questions? Well, first, I would not do that. to be clear. But if I really wanted to force them to realize they have things to hide, like we all have, I would go for the most intimate/unsettling… depending who I am discussing with:
Did you poop today? And was it easy? (this one should be both easy to answer while being considered so intimate, at least to most people, that they should have a hard time answering it without feeling disturbed).
How much do you earn?
How much do you pay in taxes? (or how do you manage to not pay taxes?)
How often do you have sex? What is your favorite position? or How reacted your spouse when you told them about that little affair you had with someone else? (here again, it all depends the person you’re talking to)And so on.
I insist, it is not something I would do but I also have little doubts most people would instantly feel like they too can value some privacy and intimacy ;)
